1. Field of Invention
This invention is directed to an image forming system that has limited amounts of consumable materials and/or that uses customer replaceable units.
2. Description of Related Art
Printers, copiers and other types of image forming systems have become ubiquitous office productivity tools for generating tangible copies of original documents and/or electronic documents. Under normal circumstances, a user would send a print request to the image forming system and then retrieve the formed image.
Invariably, problems arise when making copies on a recording medium. Problems such as lack of the recording media, depleted toner supplies, consumption of the useful life of customer replaceable units (CRU's), and/or malfunctions of the customer replaceable units due to old or broken parts, result in lower productivity and additional cost to the user and/or customer.
The above-described problems that arise during image production are usually discovered when the user attempts to retrieve the printed documents. However, at this time, the user was unaware that the printing of the documents did not take place. Thus, the user will have to conduct troubleshooting at the image forming system. If the user has requested multiple portions of different documents, the user will have to determine which jobs have been completed and which jobs have not been completed. If there is a job which is of a higher priority and that the user needs urgently, printing of the document corresponding to this job will be delayed until the problem is fixed and all other documents are printed that were sent to the image forming system before the urgent document. This could result in costly delays to the user.